Exploring Czech media discourse of refugees, asylum
seekers, immigrants and migrants (RASIM) in a
European migration crisis context, 2015–2023.
Addressing a gap in the computational analysis of large datasets of media coverage of migration in the Czech Republic.
Open, transparent, and replicable study (also for other languages
/ regions).
Investigating differences in Czech mainstream vs. alternative media’s language use:
Use of combined methods from both Corpus Linguistics
(CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Construction and corpus analysis: ~1 million
documents (January 2015–February 2023) = 800 million tokens.
Labelled 156 million tokens in documents as mainstream or alternative media; these data cleaned for CL and NLP.
Alternative media’s heightened use of voluntary
migration terms and references to “the West”
and international actors.
Shift in collocations of migration terms between the three
periods, with a distinct focus on differences between
alternative and mainstream media.
Emerging media discourse shift during the crisis following February 2022:
The 2022 crisis was (is?) portrayed as a close
reality, while the 2015 crisis was more
elusive.
Insights into far-right media communication,
anti-immigrant sentiments and responsible
migration reporting.
Calls for further Czech / international migration discourse research and interdisciplinary approach: